Wednesday, May 02, 2018

Every May Day, I feel a little more depressed. As a long-time Marxist and trade unionist, May Day should be my holiday. But watching the parade of Stalinist icons parade through London every year makes me feel shame rather than joy. Shame - but also fear about the direction the British labour movement is marching in.

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in the heyday of the global anti-capitalist movement, the official TUC May Day march had become a dying relic of an earlier form of state socialism, dwarfed by the massive, lively, carnivalesque crowds participating in the unofficial (in fact, often illegal) parallel parades. With the fall of Communism in eastern and central Europe, it seemed clear that the authoritarian model of socialism-from-above had been a dead end; the submerged democratic and libertarian traditions of radicalism seemed to be re-emerging and filling the streets. After around 2003, these crowds died down, partly, I think, as their energy was siphoned off into protests against the war on terror, recuperated by the trad left parties who'd lost control of it in the post-Berlin Wall years.

Now, we seem to be seeing something even more disturbing. Stalinism, instead of rotting away in the dustbin of history, appears to be resurgent. The dwindling, ageing bloc of grey-haired tankies (many of whom actually remembered celebrating the Soviet tanks that rolled through Prague in 1968) who carried their hammers and sickles through London every May 1 seem to have been augmented by a new generation of tankies. Scrolling through pics of yesterday's march, it looks like there are more Stalins and Maos than ever before, along with a couple of Kim Jong-uns.

Hey barber make me look like someone who will grow up to be one of the highest death count dictators in history but also a bit like that guy in One Direction